We launched our new search optimized website yesterday.  Thank you Leigh Anne for all your hard work!  After many months of research and lots of copywriting, we are all set and ready for the inbound leads to start pouring in.

As part of the new website launch we are also doing a PR blast.  Anyone that knows me well knows I’m not a PR person.  I get that it has its place but PR has always been very difficult to measure.  So instead of perfecting my PR skills, I’ve almost always outsourced this function.

But now, with social media and some pretty simple analytics we can see where we our visitors are coming from so we’ve built a PR program around the new launch.  To get over my dislike of writing news releases I’ve convinced myself that we’re doing these to support our SEO efforts as well as our overall awareness goals.

Here’s a few tips we used when drafting these announcements:

• Writing for our audience – we want to be sure that our audience understands our news and sees the value in what we are announcing, this is key to supporting out SEO efforts.  Important thing to remember here is the news comes first, SEO 2nd.  You have to make sure you don’t confuse or dilute your news by trying to overuse keywords or keyword phrases.

• Decide on your keywords before your start writing – this will help you make sure you are writing with these in mind.  Here, Leigh Anne keeps an updated list of our top keywords and keyword phrases on our white board, this way we’re looking at them every time we go to write something.  Trying to plug in your keywords afterwards will cause problems like I mentioned above.

• Links, links, links – be sure to link keywords in your press release back to pages on your website.  Best strategy includes already having optimized these pages with the same keywords.

• Optimize the important stuff – Be sure you are including your keywords in the most important places – your headline, your subhead, your boilerplate and your first paragraph.

• Press Release Grader – once again, a cool free tool from the folks at HubSpot.  Just copy and paste your press release in and it will grade the release based on language, content and SEO.  Don’t worry if you score a little low at first, it will give you tips for improvement.

• PRWeb – it’s what we use here – it’s worth it to upgrade (we use SEO visibility package).  You will be able to:
  • add links
  • add images
  • include in your own RSS feed
  • add Technorati tags
  • use SEO tools and statistics

We have seen some really great results since we started optimizing our releases.  From one release alone, we got over 100 new leads in a day.  It definitely makes the extra effort worth it.